One of the hazards of One Big Landmass is geting out away from the center and never seeing another living soul.
40kKM^2? You're talking one player per square KM, on an average server.
For reference, that's about half as densely populated as Mongolia.
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
I find that enormously unlikely, unless your engine is capable of handling that many people in one instance.
Most MMO servers can only handle ~50k people at a time...including instances. We're talking hardware limits here, not software.
Heh, of course with today's games, particularly sandboxes, reaching 50k online at once is a....rare event.
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
I find that enormously unlikely, unless your engine is capable of handling that many people in one instance.
Most MMO servers can only handle ~50k people at a time...including instances. We're talking hardware limits here, not software.
I don't know,at least read up before you answer.
Check point number 9..
9. All players will be within the same server. Other than just plain grinding for experience points, activities like taking part in political campaigns and even trading will nab players with points.
9. All players will be within the same server. Other than just plain grinding for experience points, activities like taking part in political campaigns and even trading will nab players with points.
Then they're banking on a game with fewer than 50k subs? Because at some point they must move some people to another server. Have you ever played on an overpopulated server on a busy day? Lagfest, huge spikes, frequent crashes, login queues.
I don't particularly care what the hype says; if the game gets enough players, they simply cannot make that target. Not physically (hardware) possible.
If you've access to their message board, you might ask them how many i/o events per second their servers can handle before a hard crash, and how they plan to pull off this miraculous claim in the event of a very large player base.
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
The world itself is an instance. So far, only a couple of engines claim to be able to handle 100k players at once. So far, they've never been tested, because there aren't any servers that can handle that many players.
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
9. All players will be within the same server. Other than just plain grinding for experience points, activities like taking part in political campaigns and even trading will nab players with points.
Then they're banking on a game with fewer than 50k subs? Because at some point they must move some people to another server. Have you ever played on an overpopulated server on a busy day? Lagfest, huge spikes, frequent crashes, login queues.
I don't particularly care what the hype says; if the game gets enough players, they simply cannot make that target. Not physically (hardware) possible.
Lol,how the hell do you know what they are banking on.
Lol,how the hell do you know what they are banking on.
Blind faith is refreshing. Carry on.
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
Well, I think it does when you're discussing hyperlarge game worlds, with an upper limit to number of players.
Would you want to run a huge world where the players are spread so thinly that they rarely meet? Adventure in Mongolia!
People from smaller games already often cite "It just feels dead" as one of the reasons for quitting. If you're a dev, doing an open-world sandbox, world size vs. pop size is going to be relatively important to you. You don't have level-limited zones to virtually channel your players into smaller areas.
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
Well, I think it does when you're discussing hyperlarge game worlds, with an upper limit to number of players.
Would you want to run a huge world where the players are spread so thinly that they rarely meet? Adventure in Mongolia!
People from smaller games already often cite "It just feels dead" as one of the reasons for quitting. If you're a dev, doing an open-world sandbox, world size vs. pop size is going to be relatively important to you. You don't have level-limited zones to virtually channel your players into smaller areas.
Asheron's Call has a pretty damn large landmass. But it brings players together in dungeons and specific overworld areas where the xp and hunting is better than elsewhere. Even though you could spend hours and hours wandering the landscape you never really feel that alone because you could always just recall back to the marketplace or to your guild's mansion or wherever and see other people. At least back in the day it was like that, and still on the more populated servers like Darktide. But if it didn't have the massive area it wouldn't be the same game. One of the game that is still thrilling is the fact that you can see a mountain peak 30km away and actually run there and climb it without zones or any loading.
Well, I think it does when you're discussing hyperlarge game worlds, with an upper limit to number of players.
Would you want to run a huge world where the players are spread so thinly that they rarely meet? Adventure in Mongolia!
People from smaller games already often cite "It just feels dead" as one of the reasons for quitting. If you're a dev, doing an open-world sandbox, world size vs. pop size is going to be relatively important to you. You don't have level-limited zones to virtually channel your players into smaller areas.
Asheron's Call has a pretty damn large landmass. But it brings players together in dungeons and specific overworld areas where the xp and hunting is better than elsewhere. Even though you could spend hours and hours wandering the landscape you never really feel that alone because you could always just recall back to the marketplace or to your guild's mansion or wherever and see other people. At least back in the day it was like that, and still on the more populated servers like Darktide. But if it didn't have the massive area it wouldn't be the same game. One of the game that is still thrilling is the fact that you can see a mountain peak 30km away and actually run there and climb it without zones or any loading.
Same gose for Vanguard,it really has a vast world but people still get together and you never feel alone.I guess some people really have no clue.
What the fuck, what's with this hijacking of my thread?
I'm going to read back the last 2 pages, if I notice that people have been perpretrating some stupid pingpong debate that had nothing to do with the OP and that contributes nothing of value to the topic, as in people who have found concrete measurements of MMO's or something else interesting, I'll be reporting some people especially if it continues
edit: alright, read it, if there's no more pingpong debates and thread derailments I'm ok with it.
As for DnL, yep, I know of its size, however any claim that a company can spout up bigger worlds and support a complete game community without using separate server worlds I am sceptic about unless they actually show it for proof. In my search for the world size data I've also encountered several times where the pre-release claims of the size of a world were corrected with actual, more concrete numbers after release. After all, DnL ended up being a failure of an MMORPG pretty quickly, not really something that evokes trust or believability. But only time can tell, we'll see.
The ease with which predictions are made on these forums: Fratman: "I'm saying Spring 2012 at the earliest [for TOR release]. Anyone still clinging to 2011 is deluding themself at this point."
For a while now I've been curious about the actual world sizes of various MMORPG's, not just subjective perception but concrete figures.
Yes, I know such a comparison between gameworlds has been made earlier, as can be found on this site and others, but to put it bluntly, that comparison and picture is false and a lie.
Not that I know the exact measurements of all the worlds in the games mentioned there, but several of them like LotrO and GW Nightfall are way off the mark, in fact they're so ridiculously wrong that it simply astounds me that all the sites where I found that picture just copied its figures as fact and true, without doing even the slightest factchecking.
So, here's another attempt to true worldsize comparisons with what I could discover so far.
Besides actual ingame size in square miles (or km), 2 other aspects are important to figure size out, and that's crossing distance and run speed.
crossing distance: the time it takes to travel at normal speed from one end of the map to the other end in a straight line without hindrances, as a bird could fly it
=> the most accurate way to figure this out, is to run in a straight line for 0.5-1 min, check on the map what distance you've crossed and then use this and extrapolate it to find the length and width of a map or continent in crossing time.
run speed: this is the actual ingame travel speed, crossing time doesn't mean much when you can travel in 1 MMO twice as fast at normal speed as in another MMO. It's crossing distance and run speed that give an accurate picture.
=> There's 3 ways to figure run speed out:
1. Use a human avatar of average height to get an estimation of size ingame, and then use this to figure out distances ingame (use a corpse or avatar that lies down on the ground, average human = 1.7-1.8m = x pixels etc)
2. Use the measures that are ingame (eg some spells have a range of 25m etc)
3. The most circumvential method, set your screen resolution at the same measurements for several MMORPG's, then take an object in the distance, for example, 2 inch high in all of the MMORPG's, and then measure how long it takes for you to reach it in each MMORPG. This should result in the run speeds in the several MMO's comparative to each other.
Since I'm not the only one who was curious and who did some experiments and since I don't play all these MMORPG's right now myself, I used what I could find on the internet from people who did their tests like described above. If there are people who came up with different figures from their tests, feel free to let me know.
But this is what I found out so far:
World of Warcraft
size: Kalimdor N => S coast and E=>W coast = 10 x 4 miles
Eastern Kingdoms (WoW vanilla) N => S and E => W coast = 9.5 x 3.5 miles
crossing distance: Kalimdor from N => S coast 42 min, from E => W coast 17 min
Comments: I couldn't find any accurate size or travel info, so I did a test like described above with the 50 min for Celondim => Rivendell in a straight line as a result. The world map figures are deceptive, if you look here you can see what's actually in use (pre-Mirkwood expansion)
Star Wars Galaxies
size: 10 x 10 miles for each of the 9 planets (or 10x10 km, unclear for now), 15x15x15 km for space zones
Comments: I didn't find any official statements or test results for that figure, but that's the number that has been thrown around on several sites
Guild Wars
crossing distance (source): Tyria world map is from North to South 38.5 min by 45.5 min (E -> W)
(source 2) Cantha is (N->S) 27 min by 35 min (E -> W)
size: Tyria world map is 11 x 13 miles
Cantha is 7.5 x 10 miles
run speed: 16.9 m/h (7.5 m/s)
Comments: the size is derived from the run speed and crossing distance. I've no info about Elona (Nightfall expansion), but here you can see how the 3 continents compare, and it's nowhere near the enormous size figure for the Nightfall expansion as seen in that earlier investigation.
Guild Wars 2
crossing distance:Tyria world map from North to South 38 min by 46 min (E -> W)
Comments: I used the HD video footage, the crossing distance of the human capital (huge circle) from one end to the other is roughly 2 min, extrapolated by measuring the time it took a player to travel a street in a straight line.
Rift
crossing distance: worldmap from N => S 25.5 min, from E => W 30.5 min
size: worldmap is (N->S) 4.6 miles by 5.5 miles (E -> W)
run speed: 10.8 m/h
Comments: I used the distance meter ingame to measure the run speed, made some corrections to the distance figures based on more accurate follow up tests using map coordinates
That was all what I could find so far. Darkfall is said to be very large (see for a comparison with WoW's Kalimdor here), EQ had 350 square miles explorable environment at launch (source), of EVE Online it has been stated that it takes 4 hours to cross the universe from one side to the other and Vanguard was said to be as large as Madagascar - which I found hard to believe - but that's all I could find so far.
This thread is a work in progress, if I find more concrete measurements or do some more tests I'll include it here, but if people have found more concrete info and measurements, especially stuff that isn't in this post yet, let me know and post it in this thread.
The purpose is to get the accurate figures of world size of all the current MMORPG's around.
You may want to add, World War II Online there, it has a 1/2 Scale Map of Europe seamless that is 350,000 km2 (135,136 sq mi)....takes days to cross it.
It is the largest MMO landscape to my knowledge
- Duke Suraknar - Order of the Silver Star, OSS
ESKA, Playing MMORPG's since Ultima Online 1997 - Order of the Silver Serpent, Atlantic Shard
I dont have any mathematical proof or anything but that Kalimdor vs Darkfall comparison picture seems a little off. While DF is certainly big, a lot of it is just empty space. I swam from Mahirim (wolf people) lands to the southernmost island (rubyiyat maybe? the desert egyptian styled one) and it took me about an hour. And thats pretty much exactly the length it said kalimdor was in the pic. it may be right but Idmrather have more stuff in a smaller world then emptiness. Also, a lot of DF travel is by water aka num lock and afk (which isnt frowned upon either, a lot of skill ups in that game happen when youre afk)
I agree that content density is just as important if not more important than worldsize, but this thread was purely to see how large worlds really are compared to eachother.
Another poster did some great testing, so I'm going to add his findings to this thread, it's about SWTOR's planet Hoth (approx 6.5x5.5 km)
Originally posted by Fed1
Back in Dec 2010 the maps had 200m and 1k grid lines - This made it quite easy to determine world sizes.
The starter worlds are about 2km x 2 km w actual playing area. As you level the worlds increase in size up greatly. Hoth for example is about 30 square Km open play area. ( And yes you can go anywhere and cross zones at any point.) There are exceptions to this. Chiefly being the city worlds. City worlds have districts that you MUST take taxis to reach with alot of just FLY OVER area.
Mobs densities vary as well - city worlds - can not avoid mobs. Hoth type worlds much more freedom. I can take a level 14 and run from side to side wo being killed by the level 40 mobs.
For those wishing to explore, once you get your ship, you can go to any planet and see for yourself. One of the things I am looking forward to are new worlds. Personally, I would like more Hoth type worlds and wish Tatoonie was bigger.
His findings made me conclude the following about normal run speed:
About the grid, if it's the grid on the map that could be seen on maps before, if that's really 200m, then I got the following results:
crossing a map square took ca 30 seconds, which makes the normal run speed 200/30 = 6.67 m/s or 14.9 miiles/hour, which puts it slightly above WoW (14.4 mi/h) and LotrO (14.6 mi/h).
The ease with which predictions are made on these forums: Fratman: "I'm saying Spring 2012 at the earliest [for TOR release]. Anyone still clinging to 2011 is deluding themself at this point."
Hi, I read first 8 or so pages and the last. I may have missed it sorry if I have,
Is there a *net* measurement of playable / reachable / explorable area?
For example there may be gaps/areas of map that you can never reach, usually backdrops and props. They should be excluded IMO.
Seas should be excluded too unless you can swim in, dive down and explore ship wrecks etc
For example I think in WOW WYSIWYG - since you can fly pretty much over everything and land on anything. I would also include a band of sea near the coast, since in so many cases there are ruins, ship wrecks, offshore quests etc - where you have to dive in.
As an example of areas to exclude, I played a first few levels on Rift and it seemed there were props around, I could not jump off some ledges, that was the beginning place.
What the fuck, what's with this hijacking of my thread?
I'm going to read back the last 2 pages, if I notice that people have been perpretrating some stupid pingpong debate that had nothing to do with the OP and that contributes nothing of value to the topic, as in people who have found concrete measurements of MMO's or something else interesting, I'll be reporting some people especially if it continues
edit: alright, read it, if there's no more pingpong debates and thread derailments I'm ok with it.
As for DnL, yep, I know of its size, however any claim that a company can spout up bigger worlds and support a complete game community without using separate server worlds I am sceptic about unless they actually show it for proof. In my search for the world size data I've also encountered several times where the pre-release claims of the size of a world were corrected with actual, more concrete numbers after release. After all, DnL ended up being a failure of an MMORPG pretty quickly, not really something that evokes trust or believability. But only time can tell, we'll see.
I am sorry but just because you made the thread dose not mean you own it.
Comments
To.... the land mass O_o
Yeah, they have already said 40.000sq.
http://realhistoryww.com/world_history/ancient/Misc/Jesus/Jesus.htm
One of the hazards of One Big Landmass is geting out away from the center and never seeing another living soul.
40kKM^2? You're talking one player per square KM, on an average server.
For reference, that's about half as densely populated as Mongolia.
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
Everyone is on the same server.
http://realhistoryww.com/world_history/ancient/Misc/Jesus/Jesus.htm
I find that enormously unlikely, unless your engine is capable of handling that many people in one instance.
Most MMO servers can only handle ~50k people at a time...including instances. We're talking hardware limits here, not software.
Heh, of course with today's games, particularly sandboxes, reaching 50k online at once is a....rare event.
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
I don't know,at least read up before you answer.
Check point number 9..
9. All players will be within the same server. Other than just plain grinding for experience points, activities like taking part in political campaigns and even trading will nab players with points.
LOl, what are you talking about instances for?
http://www.mmoculture.com/2011/03/darkness-and-light-epic-mmo-in-making.html
http://realhistoryww.com/world_history/ancient/Misc/Jesus/Jesus.htm
Then they're banking on a game with fewer than 50k subs? Because at some point they must move some people to another server. Have you ever played on an overpopulated server on a busy day? Lagfest, huge spikes, frequent crashes, login queues.
I don't particularly care what the hype says; if the game gets enough players, they simply cannot make that target. Not physically (hardware) possible.
If you've access to their message board, you might ask them how many i/o events per second their servers can handle before a hard crash, and how they plan to pull off this miraculous claim in the event of a very large player base.
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
The world itself is an instance. So far, only a couple of engines claim to be able to handle 100k players at once. So far, they've never been tested, because there aren't any servers that can handle that many players.
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
Lol,how the hell do you know what they are banking on.
http://realhistoryww.com/world_history/ancient/Misc/Jesus/Jesus.htm
Blind faith is refreshing. Carry on.
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
Really! again ill ask you: how do you know what they are banking on?
http://realhistoryww.com/world_history/ancient/Misc/Jesus/Jesus.htm
Well, I think it does when you're discussing hyperlarge game worlds, with an upper limit to number of players.
Would you want to run a huge world where the players are spread so thinly that they rarely meet? Adventure in Mongolia!
People from smaller games already often cite "It just feels dead" as one of the reasons for quitting. If you're a dev, doing an open-world sandbox, world size vs. pop size is going to be relatively important to you. You don't have level-limited zones to virtually channel your players into smaller areas.
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
Asheron's Call has a pretty damn large landmass. But it brings players together in dungeons and specific overworld areas where the xp and hunting is better than elsewhere. Even though you could spend hours and hours wandering the landscape you never really feel that alone because you could always just recall back to the marketplace or to your guild's mansion or wherever and see other people. At least back in the day it was like that, and still on the more populated servers like Darktide. But if it didn't have the massive area it wouldn't be the same game. One of the game that is still thrilling is the fact that you can see a mountain peak 30km away and actually run there and climb it without zones or any loading.
Same gose for Vanguard,it really has a vast world but people still get together and you never feel alone.I guess some people really have no clue.
http://realhistoryww.com/world_history/ancient/Misc/Jesus/Jesus.htm
What the fuck, what's with this hijacking of my thread?
I'm going to read back the last 2 pages, if I notice that people have been perpretrating some stupid pingpong debate that had nothing to do with the OP and that contributes nothing of value to the topic, as in people who have found concrete measurements of MMO's or something else interesting, I'll be reporting some people especially if it continues
edit: alright, read it, if there's no more pingpong debates and thread derailments I'm ok with it.
As for DnL, yep, I know of its size, however any claim that a company can spout up bigger worlds and support a complete game community without using separate server worlds I am sceptic about unless they actually show it for proof. In my search for the world size data I've also encountered several times where the pre-release claims of the size of a world were corrected with actual, more concrete numbers after release. After all, DnL ended up being a failure of an MMORPG pretty quickly, not really something that evokes trust or believability. But only time can tell, we'll see.
The ACTUAL size of MMORPG worlds: a comparison list between MMO's
The ease with which predictions are made on these forums:
Fratman: "I'm saying Spring 2012 at the earliest [for TOR release]. Anyone still clinging to 2011 is deluding themself at this point."
Guys, please stop the derail here and let the thread get back on topic.
To give feedback on moderation, contact [email protected]
You may want to add, World War II Online there, it has a 1/2 Scale Map of Europe seamless that is 350,000 km2 (135,136 sq mi)....takes days to cross it.
It is the largest MMO landscape to my knowledge
Order of the Silver Star, OSS
ESKA, Playing MMORPG's since Ultima Online 1997 - Order of the Silver Serpent, Atlantic Shard
I agree that content density is just as important if not more important than worldsize, but this thread was purely to see how large worlds really are compared to eachother.
Another poster did some great testing, so I'm going to add his findings to this thread, it's about SWTOR's planet Hoth (approx 6.5x5.5 km)
His findings made me conclude the following about normal run speed:
About the grid, if it's the grid on the map that could be seen on maps before, if that's really 200m, then I got the following results:
crossing a map square took ca 30 seconds, which makes the normal run speed 200/30 = 6.67 m/s or 14.9 miiles/hour, which puts it slightly above WoW (14.4 mi/h) and LotrO (14.6 mi/h).
The ACTUAL size of MMORPG worlds: a comparison list between MMO's
The ease with which predictions are made on these forums:
Fratman: "I'm saying Spring 2012 at the earliest [for TOR release]. Anyone still clinging to 2011 is deluding themself at this point."
Hi, I read first 8 or so pages and the last. I may have missed it sorry if I have,
Is there a *net* measurement of playable / reachable / explorable area?
For example there may be gaps/areas of map that you can never reach, usually backdrops and props. They should be excluded IMO.
Seas should be excluded too unless you can swim in, dive down and explore ship wrecks etc
For example I think in WOW WYSIWYG - since you can fly pretty much over everything and land on anything. I would also include a band of sea near the coast, since in so many cases there are ruins, ship wrecks, offshore quests etc - where you have to dive in.
As an example of areas to exclude, I played a first few levels on Rift and it seemed there were props around, I could not jump off some ledges, that was the beginning place.
Thanks
I am sorry but just because you made the thread dose not mean you own it.